


And The World Kept Turning

by ProlixInSpace



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Castiel Character Study (Supernatural), Castiel Drives the Impala (Supernatural), Future Fic, Gen, Implied Castiel/Dean Winchester, Implied/Referenced Character Death, It's basically gen but for a couple brief references, M/M, Trees
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2021-01-13 21:02:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21223763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProlixInSpace/pseuds/ProlixInSpace
Summary: It’s getting harder and harder to die.Cigarettes disappeared off the market forty years past.Proper alcohol, the poisonous kind, was banned almost immediately once a safer synthetic got a foothold in the market.Every pill and patch is equipped with tiny computers to detect blood levels of a chemical and only release their payload when the concentration dips below a pre-set threshold, making overdose nearly impossible with anything obtained legally.Even sweeteners are tightly regulated and highly taxed.And now, January 17th, 2089, Castiel’s tablet feeds him another headline that promises longer, safer lives for all:HUMAN-DRIVEN CARS FINALLY OFF ROADS FOR GOOD





	And The World Kept Turning

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this because I kept getting images of it in my head. It wasn't originally for public consumption, and it sat around my google docs for about six months before I finally decided to punch it up and let the world have a look at it. Hopefully I made the right call there.

It’s getting harder and harder to die.

Cigarettes disappeared off the market forty years past. 

Proper alcohol, the poisonous kind, was banned almost immediately once a safer synthetic got a foothold in the market. 

Every pill and patch is equipped with tiny computers to detect blood levels of a chemical and only release their payload when the concentration dips below a pre-set threshold, making overdose nearly impossible with anything obtained legally.

Even sweeteners are tightly regulated and highly taxed.

And now, January 17th, 2089, Castiel’s tablet feeds him another headline that promises longer, safer lives for all:

HUMAN-DRIVEN CARS FINALLY OFF ROADS FOR GOOD

The glassy tablet device that displays the words is itself becoming an anachronism. Almost every human has long since switched to internal systems, nanoid swarms that live happily alongside neurons and erythrocytes and keratinocytes. 

Some of them are functional, others are social, the most frivolous are cosmetic. None of them, it turns out, are compatible with angel grace, which shorts them all out, every single one, on contact. Castiel doesn’t exactly begrudge the developers’ failure to consider this particular use case. In a decade or so it might be a real issue, but for now it just leaves him looking perpetually, tragically unhip whenever he walks around with the thin panel resting on his palm.

The article’s text reveals that the headline is a little misleading -- in fact, human-driven cars _ will _ be off the roads for good _ when _ the law takes effect _ in a few months’ time. _

This is Castiel’s problem. 

He chuckles to himself when he wonders if he could get an exception for not being human, but he’s fairly sure he won’t get far with that.

Maintaining Baby hasn’t been easy. He can “heal” small problems -- dents, scratches, and the like -- but anything more complicated or intensive requires doing things the old fashioned way. He could hold her together with pure grace, but it would be a level of constant attention that is unsustainable. (He discovered this the hard way.)

Baby was _ vintage _half a century ago, and while this particular genre of car maintained a following among certain oddball humans for quite some time, it was around twenty years ago or so that the well of parts (even those cobbled together from scratch by the few remaining hobbyists) truly began to dry up. 

It is a lost art, like the manufacture of buggy-whips, or handwriting in cuneiform, and at this point, while he still calls her Baby to her face, he also privately calls her _ The Impala of Theseus. _

When they banned gas-powered cars fifteen years ago, Castiel went out of his way to get a special _ historic vehicle permit _ available only to cars manufactured prior to 1975. The permit was _ intended _ solely for the transport of museum and show pieces, but nowhere was that requirement actually codified, something he must remind everyone who squints suspiciously at the permit, and back at him, and back at the permit, and back at him _ . _

She saved the world, and she mattered to Dean, and that’s been enough for Castiel to not mind the inconveniences.

This legislation, though, strikes a huge blow to Castiel’s oath. 

He sits in the driver’s seat on a badly-pitted and pebble-covered road at the base of a hill, surrounded by trees and leaf litter. Up the slope, the grungy asphalt turns to gravel, and farther up, to nothing more than a tan, powdery dirt road with a strip of grass down the middle. It’s been a long day, even for someone who doesn’t have to sleep. When he stops, he lets the door next to him hang open, letting in the smell of summer and the sounds of cicadas rattling their love songs in the trees. 

There’s no shortage of places like this, even now -- private land away from cities and farms, places for which governments and companies have little use, seemingly forgotten by time. Castiel loves them, because if he just scoots over a little to the right, he could almost convince himself he’s a passenger again, waiting patiently for Dean and Sam to emerge from between the trees at any moment, bloodied and sweaty.

When he closes his eyes, he can imagine the sounds of gruff-voiced banter, now long-silenced. He doesn’t need nanoids, he can play these memories back in his head on his own. 

Almost unconsciously, he reaches for the empty glass vial on a leather string around his neck, and rolls it between his fingers as he thinks. 

He considers whether it would be possible to have her converted, but the words _ douche her up _float through his mind in Dean’s voice, and besides, this isn’t the first time the idea has occurred to him. It’s largely been ruled out by one mechanic after another. Maybe if he’d been keeping her up to date from the start, but now?

Impossible, they say. Might as well ask to turn a telegraph machine into a smartphone. 

He’ll do his best to keep his promise, he resolves, to keep her in good condition, even if he can’t keep her on the road. 

He considers the bunker. For a moment, he has to search himself for the last time he was there, and then it comes to him: memories of his tearful, panicked trip there when he realized Dean’s old tapes were degrading. He lovingly and carefully played each tape one last time, to convert them one by one to FLAC. Then, he filled the little storage closet where he left them with a gas that would slow their decay. That was a few years after Sam died, so it had to be around ‘59 -- thirty years prior. 

No. The tapes are fine, but it isn’t right, for the old girl to be alone like that. 

For a moment, he wonders if perhaps a museum donation is the best way to accomplish the task, but the thought leaves him cold. They wouldn’t know what they had, not really.

The orphanage would know. The legend lives on among the kids and families and staff at the _ Winchester Home for the Wayward _ and, with the land they have in the countryside, they could probably even take her out on the sly from time to time. It would be a microscopic range compared to what she’s used to, but better that than to be stilled forever.

First, he has to take her to say goodbye. 

His first destination is not too far from the bunker. Though, for the Winchesters, what was ever “too far,” really? Castiel knew Dean to take a five-hour drive for the right sort of pie, so “too far” was always relative. 

He owns this plot, but, gun to his head, he couldn’t tell anybody exactly where his land ends and the state park begins. It’s past a series of twists and turns, on roads of mixed substrate, beneath a canopy of green.

Castiel and Sam cleared this section of woods themselves, poured the gravel until it led up to the big, squarish natural clearing that they’d found for Dean. Usually he leaves the car where the gravel stops, but since this might be the last time she’ll see them, he drives her right out onto the clover and grass.

They gave Dean a hunters’ funeral, of course, but there was a distinct sense that something special should be done with the ashes the remained. Sam did some research, and they joked about the result -- _ human cremains, _ he read off the screen, _ are typically too high in pH and salt for good tree-growing on their own. _

Castiel remembers how, for the first time since Dean died, they both smiled at the shared thought: 

_ Salty. _

_ Sounds about right. _

For someone with Grace, this was a minor obstacle at most. Castiel could persuade just about any type of tree to grow anywhere with a little help. They read lists of trees and the attributes they were meant to represent, telling stories of Dean by way of trying to make a decision, grieving, the way people were supposed to.

The seed they planted grew into an olive tree that was extremely odd for the location. It was isolated enough, and the firs and pines around it were large enough to give it cover, even though the influence of Grace caused it to grew much larger than an ordinary tree of its type. 

Years later, the nature of Sam’s death was kind enough to leave him time to consult with Castiel on what sort of tree he’d like planted next to Dean’s. 

Today, they are together in beautiful contrast - Sam’s coastal Douglas-fir standing head and shoulders above its ordinary inland cousins, and Dean’s olive, the branches spread affectionately out from the sturdy twist of its trunk. 

Sometimes Castiel finds people here -- a reality that persists despite the fact that it’s private land, that it’s the “ass-end of nowhere” (as Sam once said) and that he specifically chose the spot to prevent the trees being bothered. It is likely the Grace that draws them, like some strange magnet to a compass buried deep in their consciousness. 

In some languages they’d call it a _ power spot _ or a sacred place. Humans get a sense of peace, and if they linger, small ailments might begin to resolve -- a mosquito bite would disappear, a headache would pass. Demons aren’t really around anymore, with a few exceptions who largely do their best to remain under the radar, but if one were to visit, they would likely feel very uncomfortable.

Once, he found two children carving their initials in Dean’s bark. He would never have hurt them, but he was very near to giving them a good scare, out of anger, before he decided to speak to them instead. The elder child turned out to bear more resemblance to Dean than Castiel was prepared for (though given that they were two unaccompanied kids this deep in the woods, Castiel considered in retrospect that it shouldn’t have been such a surprise.)

Castiel isn’t sure how long he sits beneath Dean’s tree. He tells them both about the orphanage and how it’s doing, about the kids who are there now, and then, after a sufficient amount of small-talk, he gets to the important bit: the headline. 

He talks through his reasoning and his plans. 

He reminds them both how much he loves them, how much he misses them. 

Then, he does what he didn’t do for most of his existence, a thing that he only does here, among the roots of this particular olive tree: he sleeps. 

At least, that’s the word that Castiel uses for it. He’s fully aware that it isn’t like the sleep he had as a human, harried and tumultuous and shallow by comparison. Were he more precise about it, he might call it a kind of deep, lying-down meditation that very much would resemble sleep if anyone were to find him here. 

Grace presses up against the boundaries of the body that contains it, suffusing his skin until he’d glow lightly if it were nighttime. Little bits seep into the ground like rainwater, and a little goes a long way, literally. If an angel were to track it, they’d find the faintest traces traveling down root systems almost half a mile away. Sam and Dean’s trees get the bulk of it, but this whole section of forest is dense, verdant, and lively.

When he opens his eyes again, it may have been a few hours or a few days. He loses track of time when he does this, having once spent almost a month in this strange state. The weather hasn’t changed, so he’s fairly certain it hasn’t been _ that _long. 

He gets in the car, and sits there until the stars come out.

Then he drives again. 

  
* * *  
  


Castiel watches the land go from dark crags and misty woods, to soft swells and dips of foothills, and then finally to the flat prairie interrupted only by the dark slash of the highway, which in turn is swallowed, mile after mile, by intimately familiar wheels.

Many humans consider it dull, but it’s somehow different every time he passes through. The steering column tilts slightly, obediently, beneath the guidance of his palms, and he savors the warmth of the leather wrap. 

Leather isn’t allowed these days, either, for the most part. The strap that spirals around the steering wheel now is maybe the fourth or fifth replacement -- he’s not sure how many Dean went through, exactly -- and had to be custom-made, from reclaimed, recycled leather that Castiel would never have been able to afford if the artisan in question hadn’t owed him a favor. 

Off the expressway and going slower now, he rolls a window down to breathe in the smell of wild plants. There was nothing but grass here, before, that would be wilted and yellow by this point in the autumn, but the “re-wilding” trend has well and truly made it all the way in from the coasts. 

There are bees just off the highway now, in the right season -- Sonja told him that on his last visit, after she’d gone and read those damned books and found out he'd been fond of them once. She thought he’d be pleased that they were thriving again.

If those bees could feel the weight of the memories Castiel had inadvertently tied to them, their little wings would never get them into the air again. 

The thing about the stages of grief, Castiel knows now, is that that’s a terrible name for them. It makes them sound like a thing you can pass through and complete. A better metaphor might be _ the rooms in the house of grief, _to account for the places you backtrack, the places you linger, and the places you stumble into by accident and forget what you came for. 

Castiel accidentally wanders into anger, because how _ dare _ Dean’s memory _ taint _ something so innocuous and seemingly disconnected as _ pollinating insects _? How dare he reach so far outside himself. He leaves the room, a moment later, and closes the door behind him.

He doesn’t actually enter the city of Sioux Falls to reach the facility, but rather skirts the outside, turning away from the smattering of mostly-abandoned homes and onto the dusty, unpaved path leading up to the property. 

Once upon a time, Singer Salvage Yard stood here. After that, there was a smoldering pile of rubble, willed to Sam and Dean Winchester. 

They recovered the recoverable and stored it all at the bunker, but aside from that, they were too busy with the unreasonable responsibilities the world heaped upon their shoulders to spend much time thinking about what to do with the land, and it was isolated enough that no one bothered them about its decay. 

This only changed after Dean’s last sacrifice, when just existing in the bunker with his memory wore both Sam and Castiel so thin they nearly tore apart. He remembers when Sam emerged, pale and blinking, into the library, for long enough to ask Castiel to go for a drive with him. 

Castiel offered to fly instead, but Sam just shook his head. The drive was part of it. The drive was_ always _ part of it. It had been part of it from the beginning, and it was part of it at the end, and here they were, somehow living and breathing and walking around _ after _that, like the world itself had ended and they’d forgotten to die. 

So they drove to South Dakota and stood in the rain, watching nature reclaim the debris of Bobby’s home in slow motion. 

It was there that they imagined the thing that stands today, which has two names. There’s the official name, the one in bronze letters over the deliberately-iron gate, and then there’s the other name: _ The House that Grace Built. _

The scope of the project was just too much for a few humans on a low budget, but there are few things more motivating to angels than the kind of duty-debt that they incurred when Jack’s will and Dean’s sacrifice were the only reasons they were alive and had a heaven to go home to.

So, they helped. 

The result, what Castiel approaches now in the Impala, is a thing that would make a delightful roadside attraction were it a bit less private. Wonky and organic in shape (because for all the gleaming sterility of heaven, when angels _ create, _ when they _ build, _they know how to do nothing but imitate nature) the layout meanders, and the materials are an eclectic mix of whatever happened to be nearby at the time of creation. The aesthetic has never made up its mind, and never will.

It is an oversized, mixed-breed mutt of an edifice, and Castiel adores it. 

Its residents vary along the temporary-permanent continuum, but they all have one thing in common: a family trying to find work-life balance, for a somewhat non-traditional value of “work.” 

It’s a bit easier these days, now that awareness of monsters is more widespread. There are grants and subsidies for people hunting within certain guidelines. The “no rules, lone wolf” types are welcome here too, though. An arrangement exists with the nearest schools to enroll the kids on a temporary basis, and staff (retired hunters, mostly) shuttle them back and forth in sleek, matte-black buses. 

They don’t get bullied the way they used to. Their parents are heroes now, not just itinerant weirdos.

Shortly before Sam died, he confided to Castiel that he felt prouder of_ that _than of any creature he’d defeated. 

Sam never had any children of his own. Instead, he looked after everyone else’s.

If they wanted to know about hunting, he taught them how to make salt rounds and pick locks and hack traffic cams. 

If they wanted help with their homework, he took them as far as he could on his own, and when the new curricula surpassed him, he’d press some of the other kids into service.

If they wanted to go to a school dance, he drove them there on the bus, sitting in the school parking lot until it was time to bring them home.

And if they’d lost someone, or if they themselves felt lost in the world, he sat with them in his study beside the eternal blue-white flames in the fireplace, and carried their burdens as best as he could. 

Now, other people do those things.

One of those people is now swaying down the path toward Castiel, getting dirt on the hem of her black dress, with an approach that very much suggests that she’s going to want a hug. He has to bend down to fulfil the implied request, and winds up with a face full of red curls. 

“I knew you couldn’t stay away long,” Rowena says through her smile. It was a long and twisted road that brought her here, much of it she keeps hidden even now, even from Castiel, but here she is regardless, from the day she appeared mysteriously at Sam’s wake in 2056 all the way to this day. She is seemingly untouched by the years, but for a little more fullness for her dresses to cling to, a little softness around the angles that were once so sharp. Her smiles are easier now, if haunted beneath the surface. “Is everything alright?”

He holds up the tablet, with the headline. 

“I brought her home,” Castiel says, an answer to the question in the air.

“Well, I accept the donation, of course.” She can’t hide the little smile as she gives Baby a once-over. “We’ll have to have a plaque made. Come inside?”

Grace suffuses the wandering walls and rolling floors. There isn’t a ninety degree angle in the entire thing. Modestly-sized photos of Winchesters (Sam, Dean, Jack, Mary, though John is notably absent) line the cluttered entryway, a thing Sam would never have tolerated when he was alive, but upon which Rowena and Sonja firmly insist now. 

There is always a picture of Castiel among them, but every time he visits, he quietly transfigures the image of himself into something else -- a beach scene, a civil-war era map of Pennsylvania, a hot air balloon, a cat’s back end as it walks away.

At first it was a matter of shame and self-deprecation, creaking beneath the weight of his burdens, but even when he broke past the worst of that, he kept doing it until it became an amusing tradition, a shared joke, where they keep putting the pictures up anyway. 

Today, he surreptitiously replaces his own face with a field of lavender.

Beside the gracefire that forms the heart of the house, perched in her floral armchair, Rowena regards him over the rim of a teacup. 

“Have you heard from Sonja?” Castiel asks of Krissy Chambers’ granddaughter, a quirky, brilliant woman who’d embraced this place, a_ family business _ all its own.

“Ach,” Rowena reacts, “If you’d come last week, or next week, you’d’ve seen her with your own eyes. She’ll be furious to have missed you. She’s off with Tarael, some kind of rescue mission.”

Castiel frowns. “Have you got the room for that?” 

There’s a little wistfulness in her smile. “Had some graduates.”

He used to spend a lot more time here, and he knows the feeling when they leave, equal parts hopeful and anxious and proud of whatever they accomplished while they were here, whether their stay was three days or three years. Back then, he did maintenance, he taught, he fed goats and chickens, he healed bites and scratches and broken bones.

And it got to be too much. Seeing Dean in the eyes of every brash, headstrong kid growing up too fast drained him. He learned the term _ compassion fatigue _and was stunned to discover that an angel could even feel that way. He still loves it, and he comes to stay and do what he can, but when it gets to be too much, he goes again.

This time, he stays for two weeks. He takes some of the kids -- the ones in a position to appreciate it -- for drives in Baby. He thinks she deserves a little more laughter and warmth than he can provide these days. They’re always faintly shocked that he needs to watch the road to drive, that the seats all face forward and only forward, that she’s so _ noisy. _

They’re interested in her, not as a car, but as a relic, the way one might be interested in a steam-powered locomotive or the airplane built by the Wright brothers. Most of them have never seen anything like her outside of old movies.

Some of them want to follow in their parents footsteps, become hunters, so when he discovers a restless spirit just a few hours out, he leads a field trip to its location with a car full of apprentices.

When the time comes to move on, Rowena pulls him aside. 

“Castiel…” Her voice warns. Her eyes flick down to the empty glass vial on its leather cord around his neck. “I’m getting a… funny sense off of you, and not funny-ha-ha. Don’t go doing anything… stupid, you hear me?”

He gathers her hands into his own. “How long have we known each other?”

“Oh, you mean… since you imprisoned me to save your then-future-husband?” she jibes, all playfulness. “Seventy-three years, by my count. Not much to you, is it?”

“I’m not so sure about that anymore.”

“What are you driving at, dearie?”

“What I meant was, after all this time…” Castiel takes back one hand, and lets it slip into a beige pocket. “I promise, I’ll let you know before I go, if I’m in any position to.”

“Well,” says Rowena, “that’s about all I can ask for, isn’t it?”

“Can I expect the same of you?” 

“Aye, if I decide to leave the party I’ll be sure to tell you on my way out.”

Between the two of them, there are enough resurrections to power several new religions. It provides an odd way of looking at life and death that is part of the glue that holds their odd little alliance together. 

During his stay, Rowena had argued that he needed a _ new _car, but Castiel can’t imagine it. Maybe eventually, but for now, he’s decided to stretch his wings a little and fly the way he used to. 

Rowena walks him out the road. 

After a hug goodbye, Castiel takes flight. 

  
  
  
  



End file.
